Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t

By Tom Phillips

“A lighthearted history of lying”—from the international bestselling author of Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up (Kirkus Reviews).

We live in a “post-truth” world, we’re told. But was there ever really a golden age of truth-telling? Or have people been lying, fibbing and just plain bullsh*tting since the beginning of time?

Tom Phillips, editor of a leading independent fact-checking organization, deals with this question every day. In Truth, he tells the story of how we humans have spent history lying to each other—and ourselves—about everything from business to politics to plain old geography. Along the way, he chronicles the world’s oldest customer service complaint, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 and the surprisingly dishonest career of Benjamin Franklin.

Sharp, witty and with a clear-eyed view of humanity’s checkered past, Truth reveals why people lie—and how we can cut through the bullsh*t.

Praise for Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“A laugh-along, worst-hits album for humanity.” —Steve Brusatte, New York Times–bestselling author of The Rise and Reign of the Mammals

“[A] perfect blend of brilliance and goofiness.” —BuzzFeed

“[A] timely, irreverent gallop through thousands of years of human stupidity.” —Nicholas Griffin, author of The Year of Dangerous Days

“Chronicles humanity’s myriad follies down the ages with malicious glee and much wit . . . a rib-tickling page-turner.” —Business Standard

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781488076770

Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips is an author and journalist from London. He is currently the editor of Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking organisation; before that, he was editorial director at BuzzFeed UK. His previous book, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up (a history of failure through the ages), was published in 2018 and has sold in 30 territories worldwide.

Book preview

This is a book about TRUTH—and all the ways we try to avoid it.

We live in a post-truth world, we’re told. But was there ever really a golden age of truth-telling? Or have people been lying, fibbing and just plain bullsh*tting since the beginning of time?

Tom Phillips, editor of a leading independent fact-checking organization, deals with this question every day. In Truth, he tells the story of how we humans have spent history lying to each other—and ourselves—about everything from business to politics to plain old geography. Along the way, he chronicles the world’s oldest customer service complaint, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 and the surprisingly dishonest career of Benjamin Franklin.

Sharp, witty and with a clear-eyed view of humanity’s checkered past, Truth reveals why people lie—and how we can cut through the bullsh*t.

Praise for Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

"A laugh-along, worst-hits album for humanity. With the delicate touch of a scholar and the laugh-out-loud chops of a comedian,

Tom Phillips shows how our species has been messing things up ever since we evolved from apes and came down from the trees some 4 million years ago."

—Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh paleontologist

and New York Times bestselling author of

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Tom Phillips has proven beyond a doubt that humans are goddamn lucky to be here and are doing nearly nothing to remain relevant and viable as a species—except, that is, for writing witty, entertaining, and slightly-distressing-but-ultimately-endearing books about the same. And if you care to avoid orbiting the earth in a space-garbage prison of your fellow humans’ design, you should probably read it.

—Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author of Get Your Sh*t Together

"Humans is Tom Phillips’s timely, irreverent gallop through thousands of years of human stupidity. Every time you begin to find our foolishness bizarrely comforting, Phillips adds another kick in the ribs. Beneath all this book’s laughter is a serious question: where does so much serial stupidity take us?"

—Nicholas Griffin, author of Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World

"Tom Phillips is a very clever, very funny man, and it shows. If Sapiens was a testament to human sophistication, this history of failure cheerfully reminds us that humans are mostly idiots."

—Greg Jenner, author of A Million Years in a Day

Chronicles humanity’s myriad follies down the ages with malicious glee and much wit...a rib-tickling page-turner.

—Business Standard

Also by Tom Phillips

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

TRUTH:

A Brief History of TOTAL BULLSH*T

Tom Phillips

To my parents, who always taught me the value of truth.

Although just FYI, I worked out that you were the tooth fairy.

Santa’s going to be so angry when he finds out you lied.

Contents

QUOTE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FURTHER READING

PICTURE CREDITS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ENDNOTES

INDEX

EXCERPT FROM HUMANS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW WE F*CKED IT ALL UP

The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Adventures in Error, 1936

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a book about things that aren’t true. For fairly obvious reasons, this has meant that I’ve spent the past year in a state of almost permanent anxiety.

The book deals with history, and history is messy enough at the best of times, filled with provisional truths and half-truths and outright myths. In my previous book, which was about failure, I wrote that the chance of this book about fuck-ups not including any fuck-ups in it is, frankly, minimal. (And yep: we have since found a few, thankfully none of them especially awful.) If writing about the topic of failure seemed like tempting the Gods of Fate, then choosing falsehood as the follow-up topic is basically presenting the gods with an open goal. And let’s be honest, the Gods of Fate are unlikely to miss a tap-in to an empty net from two yards out. Not with the kind of form they’re in right now.

So yes, there will undoubtedly be some mistakes somewhere in this book. I’ve done my best to avoid them: double and triple checking, going back to original documents wherever possible, trying to avoid the traps of overinterpretation. The endnotes should help you to check the facts yourself (and I’d encourage you to do so). But still, something will have crept through. Errors are inevitable; all we can do is try to minimize them, admit them, and mitigate them. That’s one of the main points of the book! To that end, if you do spot a factual error—no matter how small—please email me at [e-mail]. I’ll be keeping a running public list of corrections at tom-phillips.com/mistakes-and-regrets/

INTRODUCTION

Moment of Truth

You’re full of shit.

Wait! Don’t go. That was a terrible way to start a book—sorry.

I’m not really having a go at you in particular, here. That’s especially true if you’re browsing this book in a shop and wondering whether you should buy it. You should! You’re very wise! Also, witty and stylish. To be clear, there’s nothing about you especially that marks you out as being unusually untrustworthy or particularly given to falsehoods. (Unless you actually happen to be a professional con artist, I guess? In which case: Hi! You might enjoy chapter 4.)

You are, nonetheless, full of it: you’re a liar, a bullshitter, and you’re almost certainly wrong in hundreds of ways, large and small, about the world you live in. You shouldn’t feel bad about that, though, because—here’s the important point—so is everybody else around you. And, in the spirit of complete honesty, so am I.

What I’m saying is simply that, as humans, we spend our everyday lives swimming in a sea of nonsense, half-truths and outright falsehoods. We lie, and we are lied to. Our social lives rely on a steady stream of little white lies. We’re routinely misled by politicians, the media, marketers and more, and the real problem with all of this is that it works; we are all suckers for a well-crafted fib. Perhaps the most pervasive lies of all are the ones we tell ourselves.

Right now, everywhere you look, you see dire warnings that we live in a post-truth age. Oxford Dictionaries crowned post-truth their Word of the Year in 2016; in 2017, no fewer than three books titled Post-Truth were published in the UK on the same day. Politicians seem to distort and spin and lie with increasing impunity. The public, we’re confidently told, have had enough of experts. The internet has turned our social lives into a misinformation battleground, one where we’re increasingly unsure whether our Uncle Jeff is a real person or actually a Russian bot.

In fairness, it’s pretty easy to see why people think we live in a uniquely fact-resistant time. To pick one rather obvious example: right now, the USA has a president who tells lies on a daily basis—or maybe they aren’t even lies. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know what’s true and doesn’t care to find out. The effect is roughly the same. According to the Washington Post’s fact-checking team, at the time of writing, President Trump had made 10,796 false or misleading claims in the 869 days since he took office,1 following what they have described as a year of unprecedented deception.2

That’s an average of more than 10 untruths every single day, and if anything, the rate of his dishonesty seems to have been increasing as time goes by. He crossed the 5,000 fibs mark thanks to a particularly intense squall of bullshit on September 7, 2018, when he made no fewer than 125 false or misleading claims (according to the Post3) in a period of time totaling only 120 minutes. Which is more than one falsehood every minute. That wasn’t even his most dishonest day—that dubious crown is claimed by November 5, 2018, on the eve of the midterm elections, during which the Post recorded 139 inaccurate claims over the space of three campaign rallies.

This is, it’s fair to say, not especially normal. But does it mean we’re living in the age of post-truth? I’m here to say: nope.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to try to convince you that our present time isn’t stuffed to bursting with a hundred thousand flavors of horseshit—it absolutely is! It’s just there’s a simple problem with the idea that we live in a post-truth age: it would mean there was a truth age at some point that we can now be post- about.

And, unfortunately, the evidence for any such age is...uh...patchy, to say the least. The notion that we’ve recently left behind some sort of golden era of scrupulous honesty and a passionate devotion to accuracy and evidence is, to put it bluntly, a load of old baloney.

Yes, there’s an awful lot of nonsense around these days. We all contribute to it in some way, whether it’s large or small; we’ve all passed on an unfounded rumor, and we’ve all clicked that share or retweet button without checking the basics, because whatever it was appealed to our personal biases.

But, despite what you might have been told, we’ve been this way for a very, very long time.

That’s what this book is about: the truth, and all of the ingenious ways throughout history that humanity has managed to avoid it. Because none of this is new. Donald Trump is very far from being the first politician to spray falsehoods in every direction like a fucked-up garden sprinkler. We’ve never needed a Facebook log-in to spread unverified and spurious rumors from person to person. For as long as there’s been a quick buck to be made, and gullible people to make it from, there’s always been someone willing to get creative with the facts in order to part people from their cash.

Of course, defining exactly what the truth is—and what it isn’t—has never been as easy as some people might think. Then there are other questions, like...where does falsehood come from? Is dishonesty built in to humans and human society? Are humans the only creatures that lie? That’s what we’ll try to get our heads around in the first chapter, The Origin of the Specious, where we’ll explore the subtle differences between lies and bullshit, discover the unexpected fact that there are different colors of lie beyond white, and ponder the terrifying reality of just how many more ways there are of being wrong than being right.

For several centuries, the news industry has been one of our main sources of information about the world. Journalism, they say, is the first draft of history—but, as we’ll see, it’s often been a terrible first draft, the kind that has editors tearing their hair out. We’ll look at the origins of our insatiable desire for news in chapter 2, Old Fake News, where we’ll meet a dead man who wasn’t dead and discover that our modern anxieties about untrustworthy news sources and information overload are perhaps not quite as modern as we thought.

If the news business had humble origins, it didn’t stay that way for long—it quickly expanded into an industry that shaped our societies and our view of the world in profound ways. That doesn’t mean it got much more reliable, though. From the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (when the New York Sun sparked a nationwide sensation with a series of entirely fabricated articles about how the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered a complex civilization living on the moon) to some complete bullshit about bathtubs, the Hitler Diaries and the infamous cat serial killer who stalked Croydon, a lot of what we’ve read about what’s going on in the world has been total nonsense. That’s what we’ll look at in the third chapter, The Misinformation Age.

Not only have we been wrong about what’s happening in the world; we’ve done a terrible job of getting anything right about the world itself. In chapter 4, The Lie of the Land, we’ll take a journey through several centuries of, uh, creative geography. Whether it’s vast mountain ranges that never existed, implausible tales of mythical lands, or explorers who may not have actually been to the places they claimed to have explored, we’ll see how our maps have been shaped by the fact that it’s traditionally been quite hard to go and check when people just make stuff up about the far side of the world.

That’s something that was exploited by possibly the greatest con artist of all time—a man who scammed a country by inventing a whole other country. He’s just one of the small-time crooks and big-time fantasists we’ll meet in the next chapter, The Scam Manifesto, which explores our eternal fascination with grifters. From the bafflingly simple scam of the original confidence man, William Thompson, via the Soviet grifter who played bureaucracy at its own game, to the Frenchwoman who lived the high life for decades based on the unknown contents of a mysterious safe, we’ll look at history’s most incredible charlatans and ask the question: How much was a con, and how much did they believe themselves?

If there’s one thing everybody knows about politicians, it’s that they lie. The leaders of our great nations are not always honest with us. Now, in fairness to (some) politicians, that might be a little unfair—but the untruths of statecraft still deserve their own chapter. In Lying in State, we’ll examine the ignoble arts of political deception: from spin to conspiracy theories to failed cover-ups to wartime propaganda.

Wherever there’s money to be made, there’ll be someone willing to twist the truth to make it. In Funny Business, we’ll look at two of the biggest culprits: the worlds of commerce and medicine. Business has rested on deceptions small and large throughout history, from Ea-Nasir, the ancient Mesopotamian copper merchant who took people’s money but never produced the copper (prompting history’s first recorded customer complaint letters), to Whitaker Wright, who made himself a fortune in the nineteenth century on a series of frauds. And we’ll meet a selection of history’s snake-oil salesmen, from the infamous goat-gland doctor—a new-media pioneer with political ambitions who got rich from surgically implanting goat testicles into impotent men—to the man who sold a few hours in his high-tech sex bed to the great and good of London for vast sums of money.

By this point, we’ll have met many of history’s most impressive liars. But if we think that liars are the only problem we have, then we’re in for a nasty shock. It turns out that, when humans get together, we’re very good at creating myths out of thin air. In Ordinary Popular Delusions, we’ll see how manias, moral panics and mass hysteria lead us to believe some ridiculous things—from the phantom airships that haunted Britain, to the remarkably common belief that something’s trying to steal men’s penises, and from monster hunts in the American pines to...well, literal witch hunts. When it comes to living lives of truth, it turns out, we’re our own worst enemy.

And in the final chapter, Toward a Truthier Future, we’ll ask: What can we do about all this? If lies and bullshit have been ever present throughout history, what does that mean for the knowledge industry—things like science and history and all our other ways of trying to establish facts about the world? Are we doomed to live out our lives in a fog of misinformation, or are there steps we can all take to move the dial back a little toward honesty?

This book will take you on a whistle-stop tour of just a few of history’s most incredible lies, most outrageous bullshit and most enduring falsehoods. A lot of what you’ll find in here is unbelievable—and yet all of it was believed by somebody. By the end of it, you’ll understand why there’s never been a Truth Age, and you’ll have a newfound appreciation of the wonderful variety of nonsense we’ve come up with as a species. Bluntly, this book will make you a better, smarter and more attractive person.

Honest. Would I lie to you?

1

The Origin of the Specious

This is a book about truth—or, more specifically, about things that aren’t the truth.

Unfortunately, this means that, before we get any further into the book, we need to have a bit of a think about what truth actually is. And, more important, what it isn’t.

The thing is, this all gets messy remarkably quickly, because of the sheer variety of ways there are of being wrong. This might come as a surprise to some people. A lot of us assume that there’s simply true and false, and moreover that they’re easy to tell apart. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Throughout history, those who’ve pondered the nature of truth and its opposites have realized one central principle over and over again: while there’s an extremely limited number of ways of being right, there’s an almost infinite number of ways to be wrong.

Truth had ever one father, but lies are a thousand men’s bastards, and are begotten everywhere,4 the Elizabethan writer Thomas Dekker bemoaned in 1606. Or as the sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne put it in his essay Of Liars: If falsehood had, like truth, but one face only, we should be upon better terms...but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound or limit.5

This book is an attempt to catalogue just a few of those hundred thousand forms.

Ours is far from the first period in history to have become obsessed with truth and the lack of it. Indeed, there’s a whole couple of centuries that, in Europe, are sometimes known as the Age of Dissimulation because lying was so prevalent—the continent was being torn apart by religious strife from the 1500s onward, and everybody had to wear a mask of deception just to survive. Machiavelli, a man so connected with the art of political deception that we still (rather unfairly) use his name to describe it, wrote, in 1521, that for a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I even believe what I say, and if indeed I do happen to tell the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.6 Let’s be honest—we’ve all had days at work like that.

Posthumous portrait of Niccolo Machiavelli standing

Niccolò Machiavelli: he knew.

So concerned with falsehood were people throughout history that they came up with a remarkable variety of ways to identify liars. The Vedas of ancient India proposed a method based on body language, saying that a liar does not answer questions, or they are evasive answers; he speaks nonsense, rubs the great toe along the ground, and shivers; his face is discolored; he rubs the roots of the hair with his fingers; and he tries by every means to leave the house.7 Also in India, a few centuries later, was a weight-based method: the accused liar would be put on a set of scales with a perfect counterbalance. They would then get off, the scales would be given a short speech exhorting them to reveal the truth, and the person would get back on. If they were lighter than before, they were not guilty; if they were the same weight or heavier, they were guilty.8

(Interestingly this implies a completely different relationship between weight and truth from many occult trials in Europe: in India, lightness was associated with innocence, whereas in Europe appearing unexpectedly buoyant could be enough to condemn someone accused of witchcraft. As such, the Indian approach is a judicial process that makes the rare argument for the benefits of weeing yourself while in court.)

Of course, other cultures preferred simpler, more direct methods of identifying liars, such as red-hot pokers or boiling water. It is unclear if these were any more effective.

For a long time, people have devoted considerable effort to trying to classify the different types of falsehood. It was kind of the theological equivalent of writing a BuzzFeed list. As early as AD 395, Saint Augustine came roaring out of the gate by identifying eight types of lie, in descending order of badness: lies in religious teaching; lies that harm others and help no one; lies that harm others and help someone; lies told for the pleasure of lying; lies told to please others in smooth discourse; lies that harm no one and that help someone materially; lies that harm no one and that help someone spiritually; and lies that harm no one and that protect someone from bodily defilement. (I think, by the last one, he means cockblocking, but I’m not 100 percent sure.)

These days, of course, we classify lies differently. But, even then, there are subtleties that you might not be aware of. Everybody’s heard of white lies—harmless social fictions intended to enable us to all get along without killing each other—but did you know there are other colors of lie? Yellow lies are those told out of embarrassment, shame or cowardice, to cover up a failing: My laptop crashed and deleted that report I said I’d definitely have finished by today. Blue lies are the opposite, lies downplaying your achievements, told from modesty (oh, the report’s nothing special; Cathy wrote most of it, really). Red lies might be the most interesting of all—they’re lies that are told without any intent to deceive. The speaker knows they are lying, the speaker’s audience knows that they’re lying and the speaker knows that the audience knows. The point, here, isn’t to mislead anybody—it’s to signal something to the audience that can’t be spoken out loud (whether that’s basically fuck you or the more benign shall we all just pretend that didn’t happen). Imagine a couple denying to their neighbors that they had a huge row last night when they know everybody could hear it, and you’re in the right territory.

It’s often said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on. (The question of exactly who said this is a thornier matter. It’s often attributed to Mark Twain, or to Winston Churchill, or to Thomas Jefferson or to any number of the other usual suspects for quote attribution. These attributions are, of course, all lies. The earliest formulation of it may in fact have been from the iconic Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, who wrote in 1710 that Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.)

Portrait of Jonathan Swift writing in his journal

Jonathan Swift, pondering some bullshit.

Whoever said it, it’s certainly true that bullshit can move with remarkable and terrifying speed, as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to debunk rumors on the internet—that is, in fact, my day job, so, believe me, I get it.

But, in reality, the reason that untruth so often has the advantage over truth has less to do with fact and fiction’s relative speed, or even with truth’s impractical footwear choices, and more to do with the sheer scale and variety of falsehoods on offer. For every lie that travels halfway around the world, there may well be thousands that never make it out of the front door. But the sheer number of possible lies out there—unconstrained as they are by the need to match up to reality—provides a huge Darwinian testing ground to find the most compelling and long lasting among them—those zombie untruths that will keep coming back